The Medieval Python

Wenzel presents the history of the concept of acedia, of spiritual sloth," from its origins among the Egyptian desert monks through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The investigation proceeds in ch

The centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire saw extraordinary change across Western Europe - in institutions, social structure, rural and urban life, religion, learning, scholarship and a

The mendicant orders-Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, Franciscans, and several other groups-spread across Europe apace from the early thirteenth century, profoundly influencing numerous aspect of

Beginning with their introduction in the eleventh century, and ending with their widespread abandonment in the seventeenth, Marc Morris explores many of the country’s most famous castles, as well as s

A specialist in early medieval Chinese literature, intellectual history, and Daoism, Chan (Chinese, Hong Kong Baptist U.) explores the literary representation of the worldview, psyche, and attitude of

Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and auth

The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It describes the 'image' discarded by later years as 'the medieval synthesis itself, the whole organisation of their theology, science and history into a single, complex, harmonious mental model of the universe'. This, Lewis's last book, has been hailed as 'the final memorial to the work of a great scholar and teacher and a wise and noble mind'.

In Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature, leading critic Alastair Minnis presents the fruits of a long-term engagement with the ways in which crucial ideological issues were deployed in vernacular texts. The concept of the vernacular is seen as possessing a value far beyond the category of language - as encompassing popular beliefs and practices which could either confirm or contest those authorized by church and state institutions. Minnis addresses the crisis for vernacular translation precipitated by the Lollard heresy; the minimal engagement with Nominalism in late fourteenth-century poetry; Langland's views on indulgences; the heretical theology of Walter Brut; Margery Kempe's self-promoting biblical exegesis; and Chaucer's tales of suspicious saints and risible relics. These discussions disclose different aspects of 'vernacularity', enabling a fuller understanding of its complexity and potency.

The word 'medieval' is often used in a negative way when talking about contemporary issues. Why the Middle Ages Matter refreshes our thinking about this historical era, and our own, by looking at some

Witnesses to the disappearance of a text, palimpsest manuscripts bear the marks of their own genesis, with their original inscription rubbed out and written over on the same parchment. This collection

With their active apostolate of preaching and teaching, Dominican friars were important promoters of Latin Christianity in the borderlands of medieval Spain and North Africa. Historians have long assumed that their efforts to convert or persecute non-Christian populations played a major role in worsening relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in the era of crusade and reconquista. This study sheds light on the topic by setting Dominican participation in celebrated but short-lived projects such as Arabic language studia or anti-Jewish theological disputations alongside day-to-day realities of mendicant life in the medieval Crown of Aragon. From old Catalan centers like Barcelona to newly conquered Valencia and Islamic North Africa, the author shows that Dominican friars were on the whole conservative educators and disciplinarians rather than innovative missionaries - ever concerned to protect the spiritual well-being of the faithful by means of preaching, censorship and maintena

In Rome on Christmas Day 800 Charlemagne, the Frankish king, was acclaimed "most August, crowned by God, great and peacemaking emperor." This event transformed the nature of his rule, marked the re-em

How music functioned in the middle ages, what it meant to its hearers, and how it was performed: these are the subjects of this fascinating volume. The studies collected here introduce the reader to t

Early attitudes toward blindness in France and England, and the light those responses shed on contemporary attitudes toward disability

Detailed, comprehensive survey of the siege, looking at its development across three continents.

"Published in conjunction with the exhibition Uneasy Communion: Jews, Christians, and the Altarpieces of Medieval Spain, this volume provides a fascinating study of the iconography of altarpieces and

Discussion of medieval European expansion tends to focus on expansion eastward and the crusades. The selection of studies reprinted here, however, focuses on the other end of Eurasia, where dwelled th

The Hero's Place presents an innovative study of how the spaces described in a literary work contribute dynamically and profoundly to that work's meaning. Three seminal works of the Middle Ages—The Li

Egyptology: The Missing Millennium brings together for the first time the disciplines of Egyptology and Islamic Studies, seeking to overturn the conventional opinion of Western scholars that Moslims/A

The emergence of Taoism during the 3rd through 8th centuries as China's indigenous higher religion affected all areas of culture. This volume, one of a pair by Paul Kroll (its companion dealing with o

This first volume of papers from conferences is devoted to the study of Conversos, Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, and Moriscos, Spanish Muslims who also converted. Ingram (modern history,

With their active apostolate of preaching and teaching, Dominican friars were important promoters of Latin Christianity in the borderlands of medieval Spain and North Africa. Historians have long assumed that their efforts to convert or persecute non-Christian populations played a major role in worsening relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in the era of crusade and reconquista. This study sheds light on the topic by setting Dominican participation in celebrated but short-lived projects such as Arabic language studia or anti-Jewish theological disputations alongside day-to-day realities of mendicant life in the medieval Crown of Aragon. From old Catalan centers like Barcelona to newly conquered Valencia and Islamic North Africa, the author shows that Dominican friars were on the whole conservative educators and disciplinarians rather than innovative missionaries - ever concerned to protect the spiritual well-being of the faithful by means of preaching, censorship and maintena

This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a m

Fascinating insights into medieval life. THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Pontius Pilate is one of the Bible's best-known villains--but up until the tenth century, artistic imagery appears to have consistently portrayed him as a benevolent Christian and holy symbol of bapti

To complement his first collection of articles (Rome's Fall and After, 1989), Walter Goffart presents here a further set of essays, all but two published between 1988 and 2007. They mainly focus on tw

Blessings were an integral and vital element of medieval Christian life and worship. Benedictions for homes and workplaces, the knight and the pilgrim, the city under siege, and the fetus in the womb,

The fourteen papers collected in this volume explore the medieval art, architecture and archaeology of King's Lynn and the Fens. They arise out of the Association's 2005 conference, and reflect its c

The fourteen papers collected in this volume explore the medieval art, architecture and archaeology of King's Lynn and the Fens. They arise out of the Association's 2005 conference, and reflect its co

Compilation and miscellany manuscripts were widely owned in the late middle ages, by both the laity and the clergy. Here, their possible influence on Julian of Norwich's Revelations is explored. The

In this volume resulting from a 2004 meeting of the Association of Medieval Hebrew Poetry and Renaissance Literature, Guetta (Jewish thought, l'Institut national des langues et civilisations orientale

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

A major study of women and the medieval Irish church, this book includes ground-breaking investigations of medieval nunneries in Ireland, their personnel, patrons, buildings and estates and their stra

The plagues of the 14th through the 17th century have been studied from any number of angles, but the effects of the plagues in Spain have largely been ignored. Garza (Spanish, University of Tennessee

Up to the twelfth century, writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were understood to convey the truth. The second half

Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition (The Canterbury Tales, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, and Lydgate's Fall of Princes), Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a 'narrative enactment of cultural authority'. He traces its development through the two strands of the medieval Latin tradition which the Chaucerians appropriate: the sermon exemplum, and the public exemplum of the Mirrors of Princes. In so doing, he reveals how Chaucer and his successors used these two forms of exemplum to explore the differences between clerical authority and lay power, and to establish the moral and cultural authority of their emergent vernacular tradition.

His roots lie deep in an Indian bodhisattva but Dizang is a central figure in Chinese Buddhism, the sovereign of the underworld and the savior of those passing through it. By analyzing a variety of so

A.J Pollard takes us back to the earliest surviving stories of Robin Hood, the stories, tales and ballads of the fifteenth century and he re-examines the story of this fascinating figure. Setting out

Peter Lombard, a twelfth-century theologian, authored one of the first Western textbooks of theology, the Book of Sentences. Here, Lombard logically arranged all of the major topics of the Christian f